Make preschool universal for every 4-year-old in America. Despite research showing its benefits, only about half of the roughly 8.1 million 3- and 4-year-olds in the United States are enrolled in preschool, with only one in four enrolled in publicly funded preschool. Hillary believes that every child deserves the same strong start. That’s why she will work to ensure that every 4-year-old in America has access to high-quality preschool in the next 10 years.

Right now this is just talking about access and funding, but with the unnatural and developmentally inappropriate “rigor” for kindergarteners I’ve been concerned about this push for universal preschool. When will states start making this compulsory? Especially when there is federal money at stake. They are not going to fund empty preschools.

Plus, this diminishes private preschools, especially church-based preschools that may not be able to compete.

She also wants to incentivize parents, especially mothers, to put their kids in day care.

Significantly increase child care investments so that no family in America has to pay more than 10 percent of its income to afford high-quality child care. The cost of child care has increased by nearly 25 percent during the past decade, while the wages of working families have stagnated. While families across America are stretched by skyrocketing costs, child care has become more important than ever before—both as a critical work support for the changing structure of American families and as an essential component of a child’s early development. These high costs severely squeeze working families, prevent too many children from getting a healthy start, and act as a disincentive for parents to stay in the workforce. Hillary will fight for every family in America to have access to high quality, affordable child care by significantly increasing the federal government’s investment in child care subsidies and providing tax relief for the cost of child care to working families.

Child care isn’t something that we typically write about here at TAE, but there is a theme present here. A push to further remove children from their parents at earlier and earlier ages. I’m not saying there is not a need for day care, and that many families have to have two incomes. What I’m concerned about is that staying at home, especially when children are young, is almost seen as a bad thing.

And of course government is going to fix all of this.

Then she wants to double down on a failed program.

Double our investment in Early Head Start and the Early Head Start–Child Care Partnership program. Early Head Start provides comprehensive services to our youngest learners and their families—including health, nutrition, and pre-literacy support with a strong focus on children’s social and emotional development. The Early Head Start–Child Care Partnership program brings Early Head Start’s evidence-based curriculum into the child care setting to provide comprehensive, full-day, high-quality services to low-income families. To ensure our children have a strong foundation to learn, Hillary will double the number of children served by Early Head Start and the Early Head Start–Child Care Partnership program.

Head Start is a welldocumentedfailure. Even the federal government admits it, so it takes some incredible stupidity to think that doubling your investment is a good idea. Wow.

This brings me to what disturbs me the most with her early childhood education plan.

Expand access to evidence-based home visiting programs. There is increasing scientific evidence that brain development in the earliest years of childhood is crucial to economic success. That’s why Hillary will double our investment in home visiting programs such as the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. These programs—which provide home visits by a social worker or nurse during and directly after pregnancy—significantly improve maternal and child health, development, and learning.

Funding social workers to come into homes. Look having worked with at-risk youth for 13 years and adolescents in general for 20 years I understand the value of having parental coaching. Being a home schooling parent however the thought of a federally-funded social worker come into my home gives me the willies. No thank you. Here again we have the federal government stepping into the role that was once filled by the church and extended families. They used to be the ones who would provide mentoring and assistance for young parents. That has been lost, and programs like what Hillary Clinton suggests exasperates that loss.

Ultimately the question that needs to be asked of Hillary Clinton’s proposals is what is the constitutional mandate for this?

Where do you get the idea that children are being pushed away from their mothers? Or that children staying at home is a bad thing? Having childcare or preschools available and affordable is not suggesting that at all. I think your viewpoint is skewed here.

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